With just days to go before China is set to try and join the world's exclusive club of space explorers, officials slapped a ring of security around the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern Gansu province.

If successful, the mission will place China alongside Russia and the United States as the only countries to put a man in space, although China's flight will follow the earliest manned space flights by more than four decades.

The center, located in one of China's most inaccessible and arid regions, was to be sealed off Sunday and outsiders refused access ahead of the launch, expected between October 15 and 17, the Chengdu Evening Post reported.

Officials were in particular checking journalists' identifications and would only admit reporting teams carrying letters of invitation from high-level officials, the paper said.

The government has announced that once the Shenzhou V manned space vehicle is launched this week, it will orbit the earth 14 times on a 21-hour mission. Landing is scheduled to take place in neighboring Inner Mongolia.

Leading newspapers -- from the staid People's Daily to more lively tabloids -- were carrying detailed reports and full-color photos of preparations for the history-making event.

And despite the strict security at Jiuquan itself, visitors were crowding to the remote area, eager to perhaps catch a glimpse of the "Long March" II F carrier rocket, which had already been transported to the launch pad.

Hotels in the area reported no vacancies, forcing some hotels to use meeting rooms as makeshift dormitories and encouraging most of them to charge twice the normal rates, according to the Chengdu Evening Post.

Media hoping to cater to a news-hungry public have published a vast amount of copy about the secretive Jiuquan area, which has been the scene of space experiments since 1958.

As a reminder of the long history of China's space program, 500 people involved in research and tests at Jiuquan are buried at a cemetery a short distance from the launch site of the Shenzhou V, Xinhua news agency said.

Among those interred is Marshal Nie Rongzhen, one of the founders of not just China's space program, but also its endeavors to acquire a nuclear bomb.

If China were to one day consider colonizing Mars, its space experts would have plenty of experience in turning inhospitable places into livable environments.

Jiuquan was a desert when the satellite launch center was first established nearly half a century ago, but now has become an eco-friendly city with more than 60 oases, a swimming pool and a nature park, Xinhua news agency reported.

So far, however, China's plans for future space exploration are more modest, and include building a version of NASA's Hubble space telescope, according to state media Sunday.

The project, which was originally hatched by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1992, is now the focus of two research groups working to meet a 2005 timetable, the Beijing Star Daily reported.

The Chinese telescope will be about one meter (three feet) in diameter, weigh two tonnes and have a lifetime of three years, according to the paper.

SPACE.WIRE